Ingres to join Eclipse

Californian database specialist Ingres has just joined the Eclipse Foundation Open Source developer network.

Ingres and the Eclipse Foundation have offered a joint software package download for many years now. The package includes Eclipse tools and the Ingres database. Versions are available for Windows (32 bit) and Linux, and there is also a source code package. The package is released under the Eclipse Public.

Tom Berquist, Chief Financial Officer with Ingres, explained the reasons for investing in the development of the Eclipse package in his blog back in February. Ingres actually started research and development work on the project in the second half of 2006. Berquist expects the package to pay dividends for Ingres in the form of new customers who download the Eclipse-Ingres bundle, develop applications for it, and then invest in the database infrastructure offered by Ingres. Bergquist anticipates initial returns, in the form of orders, late in 2007.

Market researcher Forrester Research investigated the suitability of database systems for enterprise deployment and found that the Ingres and MySQl alternatives take the lead positions after IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.